A remarkable adaptation of William Congreve’sThe Way of the World at the Folger. As part of the on-going women’s festival of plays in DC, Theresa Rebeck updated Congreve brilliantly and then directed it with bravura and panache. Very effective. Interesting for anyone who has read or seen Congreve’s play and equally great fun for anyone who has not. Strongly recommended

Witwoud: “Truths! ha, ha, ha. No, no, since you will have it. I mean he never speaks truth at all — that’s all. He will lie like a chambermaid, or a woman of quality’s porter. Now that is a fault. (Congreve, Act I)

Friends and readers,

Although it’s too late to get to this surprisingly apt and often funny-cruel adaptation of Congreve’s The Way of the World by the successful woman playwright, Theresa Rebeck, at the Folger (tomorrow night is the last performance), I write to say hurry out to see it if is is revived anywhere near where you live. You need never have read or seen Congreve’s The Way of the World, so thorough going and consistent is the adaptation, though if you have, the parallels and comparisons reinforce the bitter things that happen and are said in Rebeck’s play. They also show the timelessness of Congreve’s types and situations which seems so easily retrofitted in 2018. The lavish costumes (over-the-top priced shoes, handbags and accessories) reflect actual realities in shopping today. Rebeck’s wit is penetrating as her doubles for Congreve’s players enact the aimless luxurious self-centered lives of the 1% to be experienced in the Hamptons on Long Island.

Letting blue language fly in her update of the Restoration comedy “The Way of the World,” for one thing. William Congreve’s takedown of money-grubbing nuptials is being updated to the Hamptons in a voice that sounds like pure Rebeck: energetic, contemporary, funny and brutally honest about gender and leverage.

for screwball cynical farce:

Jayne Blanchard: “The characters in The Way of the World are pros at sniping and subterfuge and show us peons how snark can be done with style … In other words, it’s a bitch to be rich.

No one feels that more acutely than Mae (Eliza Huberth, grounded and gleaming with goodness), an American heiress who wears her $600 million fortune like a giant price tag on her head. Well-meaning and altruistic, Mae feels—and rightly so, the way she is treated by family and friends—that no one really sees her, only a bunch of dollar signs and zeros.

and a paradoxical feminism, appropriate for this play, part of a festival of women’s plays going on in DC:

Caroline Jones: “As the male characters trip over themselves in search of sex and money, the women reveal that they, in fact, hold the power in most situations. It’s an appropriate theme for the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, which celebrates the work of tenacious female playwrights from around the world … Thematically, it’s clear that Rebeck wants her adaptation to focus on the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. That idea comes through, but what makes the play fascinating is the relationships between the characters and the ways they abuse the people they love. Their desires, both long-term and temporary, are wrapped up in other individuals, something you don’t typically see in a comedy that includes regular uproarious laughter.”

What I enjoyed most was the superb comic-acting, which in a couple of cases is suggestive enough to make one feel sorry for the character. The brilliant timing, wild-letting go, and seeming unself-conscious self-expose of Kristin Nielsen as the lascivious aunt who is grieving for her loss of beauty and lonely is the power-house at the center. Truly funny soliloquies by Ashley Austin Morris, the desperately over-worked, rich-people worshipping and thieving waitress who is snubbed and taken advantage of, sometimes in a very ugly ruthless way — Mirabell is turned into an utter stud: Henry fucks every woman in the play and one of the men threatens to take her to the police unless she uses her Foible-like talent for manipulation to help him corner Mae-Millamant.

Henry oddly venomous as after fucking Ashley Martin Morris as the waitress-Foible

The critics above all write of Mae as effective, but I thought the part made her silly: she wants to give all her money to Haiti but seems to have no idea how to go about handling or keeping her money herself, much less disbursing it to anyone. After the terrific anger she displays at Henry, and she utters the most lines taken straight from Congreve that I recognized and some of the best in Rebeck’s play, she becomes blandness itself, almost a silent woman, saved for comic effect by her tasteless golden-hard wedding gown, which she keeps complaining is “too tight.”

For witty lines Rebeck did much better with the modernized Mrs Marwood, Erica Dorfler as Katrina, the ex-mistress (old-fashioned word but “previous love” doesn’t seem right either) of Henry, one of a trio there to needle the other characters. She gets some hard lines.

I found myself remembering that in Congreve’s play Mrs Marwood was the bitterest and the most hurt of the characters: she has carried on adultery with male named Fainall, who has used, abused, and reproached her for betraying her friend, his wife; he hates being married, but she cannot bear that she has been “vicious” on his behalf and only gotten punishment for it (Congreve, Act II, lines 145-220).

Both Charles and Lyle are given wry lines reflecting on our world today: both are gay and would much prefer to go to bed with Henry, but that he prefers women. Not all of Congreve’s characters are transposed. The Fainalls (Mr and Mrs) are missing, and there is no fop (unless Lyle is meant to be), but there is a clown-fool: Elan Zafir as Reg, the bumpkin from the country is a Trump male type, crude and concerned to protect his manliness. When he goes to bed with Rene, he manifests intense distress lest she tell anyone.

Reg-Witwood is the one with the crass jacket and beer in his hand

All four didn’t have enough to do with the story of Henry’s quest for Mae and her money — unless that was the point. Much of the skilfull manipulation is done by Henry in a final battle with Rene over who knows more than whom and can therefore cheat and exert power over the other. As in Congreve’s play this one ends with a final duel of words and threats and compromises between Henry and Rene (Mirabell and Lady Wishfort). Some of the themes were startlingly apt for the year 2017: everyone lies and it’s asserted repeatedly there is no such thing as a truth that counts if you can shove it out of sight and delude others. Money conquers all.

Congreve it’s not. Nowhere as deep or thorough, or angry or pessimistic or deeply felt — or witty. But I hope it doesn’t disappear because it is more than a flippant rancid-stew. There is feeling now and again. Katrina or Mrs Marwood is really hurt when Henry escapes quickly after their night together and never phones. She is told by Charles (Witwoud) that men do not feel about phones the way women do. Other characters want someone to phone them back — this is not a group into texting though they walk around with cell-phones.

Most of the emotion is felt by snubbed waitress and the ridiculed Rene, who gives a final speech which would seem to contradict the whole play: Rene asserts what makes life worth while is devotion, relationships, loyalty, even love. This is not let to stand for too long, but it is part of the plot-design that what the heroine, Mae, wants is for the hero-stud, to be concerned for her feelings, truly in love with her, not to lie, and to be sexually faithful.

I read with a class on 19th century Women of Letters this past term Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen: The History of a Scotch Family 70 Years Ago, and am gratified to report the class as a whole liked it very much: some called it a “page-turner;” it was a class of 35 and I’d say about 25 stayed the course (it’s was a sort of college course where there is no exam, no papers, mostly made up of retired adults, towards the end all but one were women), and most of them read Kirsteen, and were eager to discuss it. Over on Trollope and his Contemporaries (the one yahoo list I moderate, apparently still going despite all yahoo’s software failures), one of the first non-Trollope novels we read together, after a period of just Trollope and then trying to reconstitute the list in new directions was her last Carlingford book, Phoebe Junior, and it brought the list to life again. Penelope Fitzgerald wrote the introductions to the Virago press publications of two of the Carlingfords, Salem Chapel and The Perpetual Curate. Miss Majoribanks, yet another, is the one book feminist readers read and often praise, the Carlingford novels because of their original connection to Trollope (as about church politics in the dissenting vein) are still known and some in print (they were her success among English readers). People who read gothic works are aware of her masterpiece ghost story, The Beleaguered City, and her uncanny shorter ghost stories.

I write this blog tonight because earlier this week Oliphant came up on a face-book discussion group page, Readers of Fine Literature, where someone was so enthusiastic about Oliphant’s Hester, as extraordinary (the first time I read it I thought it a masterpiece that should be assigned alongside the usual “great Victorian novels”), that the posting prompted “ayes” and citations of books by Oliphant different people enjoyed, or denials of Oliphant as filled with pleasure, with vows never to try an Oliphant again. I want tonight to describe briefly or add three more heroine’s texts to those I’ve analysed here on these blogs already (Phoebe Junior, Hester, The Marriage of Elinor). Agnes, The Ladies Lindores and Lady Carr (a four volume work) and Kirsteen, and to suggest how her very late ghost story, The Library Window is yet another and a comment on her career. They are novels comparable in subtlety and interest to those of Trollope, Gaskell and Eliot. Their criticism of marriage and presentation of women’s lives put them together with Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Caroline Norton’s Lost and Saved. Their uses of irony show her early immersion in Austen (her first two Carlingford novels have characters named after Austen, situations reminiscent of hers. For her life and work, start at the Victorian Web.

It’s best to be either brief or write at length for a magazine. Here we must opt for concision. Why? Oliphant writes realistic novels which are not easy to describe as they often move episodically. Their subversive and riveting material comes in inward interstices and twists and turns of stories whose endings are often unexpected. When they happen, these feel inevitable and as coming from the situation as it’s evolved or been all along. Most are almost strongly unsentimental. Agnes is very like Elinor in that the heroine makes a bad marriage and the novel is about how she copes — or doesn’t. Customs and laws inflict problems on Agnes which her ne’er-do-well husband doesn’t share, but when her husband dies she finds she loses all personal happiness; her child is taken from her; complex feelings most novels didn’t go near until very recently are the subject matter.

I find her Ladies Lindores and its close sequel Lady Carr compelling throughout; I could hardly put the first volume down. Taken together, they form (as Merryn Williams writes in her great Critical Biography of Oliphant) a story about human indifference to one another, cruelty and “torture” (Oliphant’s word for inward pain). The father of the family inherits a peerage and becomes a tyrant to his wife and daughters in his insistence the two daughters marry money so Caroline, sensitive, gentle is sold to a brutal man with her mother unable to protect her from his violence. Oliphant breaks a tremendous taboo when she has Caroline cry out in gladness when her husband is accidentally killed. She remarries the young man she had originally longed for (Lady Carr) but ends up alienated because the man she had so dreamed of turns out to be superficial, a dilettante, egoistic. Its Scottish landscape is deeply appealing, and she has Walter Scott in mind as she describes Scottish culture more wryly and realistically. Italy and London are described well too.

Kirsteen is the book that (like Miss Marjoribanks) seems to speak most to women more today. It is the story of a young girl’s flight from an enforced marriage in Scotland, from a tyrant father, a life of utter devaluation of herself as anything other than an obedient woman within a family geared to making white men the owners and rulers of society, and her successful entry in London into a seamstress business, where she invents a satisfying life for herself as seamstress and co-partner. Oliphant’s women might seem better off when they start out disenchanted — like Kirsteen’s sister, willing to marry the older man Kirsteen flees because he will provide title, home, children and he is gentle — she hasn’t that low expectations but lives with his lack of status in London and ends content enough to be with Kirsteen’s neighbors at Kirsteen’s shop — the truth being she doesn’t care about much but her rank, status, creature comforts, and convenience. But such people are not to be depended upon at all; Kirsteen’s younger sister might have ended with a man who forced an elopement without marriage on her; only Kirsteen wanted to act with integrity to force him away; ironically he is eliminated by the violent father, a murder he gets away with (a ploy that in Ladies Lindores too eliminates Caroline’s first husband, and for which an ordinary loyal Walter Scott-kind of servant almost pays with years of life in prison). Kirsteen’s quest is survival on terms of self-determination. She undertakes a frightening journey alone to find a place where she can be free to be herself. She reminded me of Bronte’s Villette but does not become enthralled to a man once she lands a position. Wendy Jones in her “Margaret Oliphant’s Women who want too much,” describes all three of these (Phoebe, Hester, and Kirsteen) wonderfully well. The flaw in Kirsteen is she succeeds too easily; in travel she is never sexually harassed, and much of the plot-design’s ins and outs turns on her sisters’ experience of marriage as refuge, sheer status (hollow within), and escape from rape and a life of the equivalent of prostitution.

If one includes Phoebe and Miss Marjoribanks, all five are books which Oliphant wrote later in life. Her great strength in them all is how she explores and illuminates everyday painful situations people rarely face up to, which can end up destroying or making their characters. She’s an insightful critic of other realistic novelists. She wrote one of the finest critical articles on Austen in the 19th century, in her review of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir of his aunt (Jane Austen), from which I quote a paragraph which offers a glimpse of the austere power of her own mind:

She is not surprised or offended, much less horror-stricken or indignant, when her people show vulgar or mean traits of character, when they make it evident how selfish and self-absorbed they are, or even when they fall into those social cruelties which selfish and stupid people are so often guilty of, not without intention, but yet without the power of realising half the pain they inflict … She has the faculty of seeing her brother clearly all round as if he were a statue, identifying all his absurdities, quietly jeering at him, smiling with her eyes, without committing the indecorum of laughter

These (and other) fine novels about contain incisive penetrating critiques of how women are without needed rights as inescapably and necessarily responsible adults, are led or forced to make bad marriages, while males are led to conform to destructive norms for all. I suggest she is sometimes not enjoyed because of her disillusioned views on marriage; she hardly believes love for another can exist, or it is only the rare spirit who is capable of sustaining it. I find her strengthening the way I find Samuel Johnson or other truth-tellers who use irony and open identification to convey compassion.

“The Library Window”

I end on “Library Window” (which so puzzled me when I first read it, as the reader will see if he or she clicks on the link above), since I’ve at long last realized it’s a late meditation by Oliphant on the distance she has had to keep herself from some ideals of writing and reading, and her deep yearning for approval as strongly ethical. We see also how restricted young gentry girls were kept, how closely monitored. Once Aunt Mary thinks whatever was wrong with our heroine is getting worse the mother sweeps her away. Is she ever named? She remains nameless as does Dickens’s signalman. It can be said to be a portrait of the artist as a young girl. Intense yearning: aunt says the meaning of the vision (which we are given to believe Aunt also sees) “It’s a longing all your life after –- it is a looking for what never comes. Sybilline witchlike but kind Lady Carnbee says “the imagination is a great deceiver, the heart, the eye. But if gift deceives, it consoles.”

What happens in “The Library Window?” A young scottish girl is sent for her health to stay with her aunt Mary and finds herself pinned down by imposed schedule, feminine occupations but her aunt, unlike her mother, gives her a lot of time to read. They live on high street of St Rules, St Andrews so a university not far. She becomes gradually absorbed until she sees a male at work incessantly and he sees her and after her visit to the party comes to the window and waves and then blank forever more. Coming home from death of her husband many years before, Oliphant had thought she saw him in the crowd and for a poignant moment thought he’ll help her and he vanished. There is a a bond between this unfulfilled writer seen in the window and herself. The portrait is modeled on a legend of Scott started by his son-in-law Lockhart.

Tamar Heller (“Textual Seductions: Women’s Reading and Writing in Margaret Oliphant’s “The Library Window”) thinks it strongly feminist: the man was murdered by the brothers of a girl he tried to court and was above him. Yes, that’s there too. This is the life of the artist and scholar Oliphant felt closed to her, she couldn’t achieve a Middlemarch because she had no GHLewes to shelter, to negotiate, to give her time. In Framley Parsonage we can see in Mark Robarts a certain flagellation by Trollope who also sacrificed much, and sold his soul in the marketplace. With Oliphant in this story, it’s not just that she’s trapped, but lonely and longing — this is poignantly tragically seen in Hester. Is it fair to say the girl of the story is shattered by the experience. A continual play of light, or perception, of different kinds of reality are at work. The theme her life as a writing career.

The old pump at Steventon as drawn by Ellen Hill for her and her sister, Constance Hill’s, Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends

Friends and readers,

Saturday began with a lavish morning breakfast on a terrace overlooking the beach, after which the second keynote speaker, Devoney Looser delivered a remarkable speech, and there were two breakout sessions, one directly after Devoney’s, and another after an hour and one half break for lunch. At this the conference proper seemed to be over, unless you count the “special events,” and at the last moment I paid for and heard an informative talk by a man running a local museum on printing about printing in the 18th century. Since the third keynote speech on Sunday morning was (like all the other JASNAs I’ve gone to) in mid-morning, and Izzy and I had a plane to catch (and a drive through congested highways to get there), we had to miss this once again. I have yet to hear the third keynote speech. It is not designed for those who are not staying for yet another day, half of which has no scheduled events having to do with Austen (this time it was expensive tours, wineries, beach and cruise excursions, dinners). And of course that means payment for yet another night at the typical expensive JASNA hotel. And very like the other three JASNAs where Izzy and I stayed at the hotel for Wednesday through Sunday morning, many people were leaving Sunday morning — as witnessed by the plethora of cabs, shuttles and other non-pedestrian modes of getting away (as there is no public transportation and few sidewalks in this area of California one cannot walk anywhere).

Devoney’s keynote speech was (in my case) followed by two outstanding presentations in sessions (I chose luckily at last) and a third of suggestive interest about Austen criticism. As I will try (as I have been doing) to tell a little of what I could not hear from what others told me of talks they heard, I will have four blogs after all. Here I discuss just the keynote speech and the papers I heard during Sessions D and E.

Devoney’s title was neutral: “After Jane Austen.” Like Gillian’s and the theme of the conference, her matter was not directly about Austen, but post-Austen matters, with this difference: the unusual areas she had researched, a resolutely neutral stance which allowed for much (I at least assumed) irony towards the absurd, commercial, and bizarre material she uncovered, and for a nervily dry delivery. She offered the kind of apology people do when they are not apologizing but defending a stance: she was not going to assume a “solemn” or “mournful” tone (even though this was 200 years after a relatively early death of a remarkable writer, a death I would add in great pain). No, her stance is that or closer to that of Rebecca Munford on Emma Tennant (the essay is “The Future of Pemberley: Emma Tennant, the ‘Classic Progression’ and ‘Literary Trespassing’ in Dow and Hanson’s collection, The Uses of Austen); she accepts Jane Austen and Zombies even if the argument of whatever text is pro-war is for the common good (arguably the stance of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; see my “The Violent Turn”); her view that the 1960s/70s formed a rallying time for social transformations that included Austen; she is open to ghosts of Austen haunting us, even literally and unscrupulously (if I understood her correctly). Throughout her speech her power-point presentation gave us illustrations of “the bizarre stuff” that’s out there: outrageous headlines about Austen, ludicrously unhistorical pictures, ridiculous contests and assertions, and she told several exemplary stories.

Lily James as Elizabeth and Sam Riley as Darcy fighting over a gun, guns are regarded as good ways of remaining safe in Burt Steer’s film (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies)

Devoney’s first story was about putting a plaque for Austen in Westminster Abbey in 1967; there were large sculptures of writers there, mostly male, and the burden of her theme was that quite a number of people in the Jane Austen society were not exactly for this, nor were the Westminster Abbey individuals. Yet it happened, and she could name only those she assumed had the contacts to do it (one woman who lived in Winchester all her life who “had no profession”). A sermon was given which was an attempt to diminish Austen or put her as a woman in her place Austen with “small things,” like apple pieces; absurd straining to find analogies with Biblical metaphors. The last and fourth story had a similar theme: it included as one of its principals Joan Austen-Leigh, a descendant of Austen, active in the Jane Austen Society in Britain; she wrote sequels as well as plays, and was an entertaining raconteur. The story told highlighted how rigidly prissy one of the elected officials of that society had been in, someone who had never read any Austen (as apparently several of those involved in the politics of the plaque would never have read any Austen). The second story was about the pump that stood on the site of the Steventon vicarage (torn down in the 1830s). In fall of 1793 it was reported stolen by the New York Times, and a melodramatic account was given: it happened in the “dead of night,” a Chief Inspector was involved, and it was concluded (by at least the person who wrote this remark) that it had been spirited away to the United States “by a mad Austenite.” Research on the pump that was reputed to have been there began to question a photograph of the old pump. A third was about the statue of Colin Firth as naked to the waist in the water. It seems this has been destroyed. She regaled us over silly goings-on in these incidents.

The fourth (perhaps the most interesting to follow up on) on a script for a TV movie in 1974 by Stromberg Junior (the son of the man who produced the 1940 P&P featuring Laurence Oliver and Greer Garson). Writers included Christopher Isherwood; perhaps Peter O’Toole would have been in it. Devoney had read the script and found it “a hoot:” she took the view that it mocked Austen’s book by mocking the cult values (sweetened up heterosexual romance ending in conventional marriage and family). This Lizzie can’t see spending one’s life to find a man. Devoney quoted dialogues intended to be funny; it seemed to me (like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) to have a strong gay subtext. Stromberg Jr was not a liked man, and the deal fell through; indeed there was a threat of a lawsuit. Devoney mourned that we had not had this version of P&P after the 1940 one (which she seemed to like); the implication was maybe we would have been able to have a differently framed Austen than the one which did emerge. The 1979 dramatic romance by Fay Weldon, where it should be said Elizabeth was made the center, and other serious familial romance mini-series and cinema movies? Amy Heckerling’s Clueless has been, until recently, an exception to the rule. (I’m not sure about that; it seems to me that movies made for movie-houses have tended to be broadly comic, e.g., Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility has much comedy; the Indian Bride and Prejudice and Aisha [an Emma appropriation]).

She received a standing ovation, after which there were questions and semi-speeches. One elicited from Devoney stories of the 1970s and 80s when the first feminist criticism of Austen emerged (e.g., Alison Sullaway, a friend of hers). Juliet McMaster told of her memories of the 1970s JASNAs.

I thought it a spectacular speech, beautifully delivered, probably appropriately because it was (in effect) a celebration of celebrity culture. She intended to be or presented herself (though ironically) as respectful of popular reactions to Austen’s works (or to the framing of them); and among the books she praised at the outset was Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites: A Journey through the world of Jane Austen Fandom. Jane Smiley remarks (rightly) that this book includes interviews with quite a few men: as someone who has been a long-time inhabitant of the listservs and pays attention to the blogs, I know that this is a distortion: at no time over the years I’ve been on-line have I ever seen more than one or two men active on the listservs, and most of the time they acted as thorns in the bush, aggressively insulting (Arnie Perlstein used to do this) or objecting “robustly” (as some put it) to other views. Scottie Bowman, whose death was responsible for his disappearance used to enjoy himself mocking Austen-l members; with his pretense of urbanity and gift for poisonous banter he was one of the causes of the famous Fanny wars. He was a troll though a published novelist. But men have more prestige than woman, and it’s not that acceptable to admit that still most of the most fervent fans are women. Yaffe’s book is not broadly accurate but spotlights what she thinks will be entertaining and attract readers and sales, and those interviewed are delighted by the attention Other books deliberately turn for their findings not to the unknown ordinary female Janeite (or unnamed except on the Net), but to published books, films, which are usually skilfully manipulated commodities intended to reach far more than Jane Austen fans whose appeal is quite different than Austen’s books. It’s easier to catalogue tourist sites than track down the unpublished (see Kathryn Pratt Russell’s “Everybody’s Jane Austen,” South Atlantic Review, 76:3 (2011):151-57; she reviews Juliette Wells’s Everybody’s Jane and Claudia Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures. Russell finds that Claudia Johnson uses her findings to describe powerful ideas about class, sex, and culture (of the type that feed into populism).

I know I am unusual in critiquing celebrity culture for its falseness and for maintaining that one can evaluate and judge between works. In fact Johnson evaluates and is condescending; how could she not be? But I am not alone. John Sutherland (on Helene Kelly’s Jane Austen: Secret Radical; scroll down “on the anniversary”) and Ruth Bernard Yeasell hestitate and critique too (see Yeazell’s “Which Jane Austen,” NYRB, 64:14 (Fall 2017):63-65.

Mary Marshall’s “Sanditon: Inspiring Continuations, Adaptations, and Spin-offs for 200 Years” (Session D) drew me because I’ve gotten to know Chris Brindle’s filmed play, Sanditon and have the edition of Sandition by Prof Marshall which includes Anna Lefroy’s continuation, which Marshall was respectful of. She began with the larger picture: Sanditon is the least adapted of the novels, Pride & Prejudice the most adapted, with Emma at this point coming in second (though S&S is still a strong contender for second place). Sanditon was first known to the public in 1871 when James Edward Austen-Leigh described it, summarizing it in the 2nd edition of the Memoir. It was first published in 1925; 1954 Chapman made a much more accessible edition; it is the largest surviving manuscript we have (longer than The Watsons, though The Watsons is far more polished and finished, with implications much fuller as to how it was to proceed): 24,000 words in 12 chapters. Austen was giving us a much wider world than she had before, her language is more relaxed and at times so fresh the descriptions; the plot is unfolding slowly, with its direction not yet clear. Basically Marshall then described several of the continuations. Anna Lefroy’s, written between 1845-60, was first published in 1983 by Marshall; she had been working as a rare book cataloguer, and came across this working draft. It was Anna who had the cancelled drafts of Persuasion (she reminded us). She carefully developed the Parker family in a direction consonant with what Austen wrote. There is a real aptness and similarity of tone. The POV is Charlotte, Charlotte and Sidney are to marry; Sidney is clearly going to help his brother-in-law; Marshall was reminded by one of the new names of Hasting’s man of business, Woodman; the ambiguous character of Tracy is developed – a business world is being put before us.

A brief list: 1932 Alicia Cobbet (?), whose text is not faithful to the original personalities at all, with its melodramatic plot about kidnapping, smuggling and the like. A best known continuation: by Austen and “another lady (Marie Dobbs): Dobbs extended the story in a direction Dobbs thought Austen’s novel might have moved; Charlotte, for example, thwarts Edward’s seduction of Clara; Sidney proposes to Charlotte. 1981 Rebecca Baldwin who hopes the reader may take what she has written as homage to Austen; Julia Barret 2002 whose book Ms Marshall said is said to be terrible; Regina Hall 2008, where a mere description showed ludicrousness; Helen Marshall 2012 wrote a bizarre short story. Carrie Brebis, The Suspicion at Sanditon; or, The Disappearance of Lady Denham 2015, a “Mr and Mrs Darcy mystery,” was characterized by Marshall as “a well-written mystery.” Then there are several self-published texts: Juliet Shapiro 2003; Helen Barker The Brother 2002; David Williams’s Set in a Silver Sea 2016 with Miss Lamb as the main character. This is not the complete list she went over; I am missing titles; it was clear that Ms Marshall enjoyed some of these.

She then told us about Chris Brindle’s play, the film, the documentary; he owns the Lefroy ms, recruited Amanda Jacobs who sang his music very well (especially the beautiful duet, Blue Briny Sea; you can listen here to his most recent music for Jane Austen). Her last text was the coming (she hoped) new Sanditon commercial film (2018-19), with Charlotte Rampling as Lady Denham, Holliday Grainger as Charlotte, Toby Jones as Tim Parker, John O’Hanlon ,the diretor, Simone Read scripting. After she finished, I asked if she agreed with me that Chris Brindle’s was a fine continuation and Chris was right to take the two texts (Austen’s and Lefoy’s) in a direction exposing corrupt financial dealings, and she said yes. I regretted more than ever not having gone to listen to Sara Dustin on Friday on “Sanditon at 200: Intimations of a Consumer Society. I had chosen the paper on Jane Austen’s letters, wrongly as it turned out, for it was just a basic description and introduction to the problematic nature of the letters, which I’ve known about since blogging about this letters here for over 3 years. Peter Sabor said he had had the privilege of reading the script for the coming film, and it seemed a work of reminiscence. Many questions were asked about the textual sequels. This was perhaps the best session overall that I attended.

Emma Thompson as Elinor writing home to her mother

After lunch, I listened with much profit to Susan Allen Ford’s “The Immortality of Elinor and Marianne: reading Sense and Sensibility” (Session E). She was interested in using the development of the sequels and films (sometimes from one another) as a way of understanding Austen’s novel, both how it has been read and what it is in itself. She covered three sets of texts, the books, the staged plays, and the films. I’ll start with what she said of the films: since Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s 1995 Sense and Sensibility, the novel has been read through it again and again, and it has influenced all other Austen adaptations (including non-S&S ones), she covered it thoroughly, including its many departures. The treehouse, the use of the handkerchief, and the way Marianne is rescued twice, first by Willoughby and then by Brandon have been especially influential; Rickman’s performance has mesmerized audiences, the gorgeousness of landscapes and houses, the melancholy music. I’ll add the lighting and coloration and that what Thompson “corrects” others have before her too. Rickman is anticipated by Robert Swann in the 1983 mini-series, but it had a somber dark vision (it’s by Alexander Baron) that has not been influential; Susan commended this mini-series for the use of complex contrasting depictions of Elinor and Marianne and its the first to include a loving depiction of landscape. She mentioned the Tamil Kandukondain Kandukondain or I have found it, as effective modernizing (Elinor looking for a job for example) but under the influence when Bala (Brandon) rescues Meenu (Marianne) from a sewer. There is a deep intensity in Davies’s 2008 film, which by the end has lost contact with the original scepticism of Austen’s book in its comic joy; Barton cottage is now by the sea and Brontesque in appearance.

The book sequels exist because of readers’ desire to spend more time with Austen’s characters, to experience the book’s conflicts. Like the films, they often give a bigger role for Margaret, maked the heroes more central, more acceptable, and more (erotic heterosexual) loving. It’s obvious (Susan thinks) that Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story lies behind Austen’s novel. The didactic and verbal parallels are striking. Austen changes a lot, gives psychological complexity, so her book resists easy encapsulating moralizing. Early on Isabelle de Montolieu’s adaptive translation changed the novel in her translation to be much more sentimental. Rosina Filippi wrote dialogues in the early 20th century, including the debate betweeen John and Fanny Dashwood over how much money to give his “half-sisters.” Susan suggested Emma Brown, an Austen great-great niece, wrote a strong sequel. In hers Margaret wants to observe life, to travel and elopes to Scotland. Susan went over Joanna Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility: the story is updated; the situations repeated in modern terms. She too has a treehouse.

Irene Richards and Tracy Childs as Elinor and Marianne debating whether Marianne can take Willoughby’s offer of a horse (1983 S&S)

Susan said the two recent staged plays have been a delight, especially Kate Hamil’s which returns us to Elinor as central POV; she breaks with realism for high activity and comic effect. Both repeat elements not found in Austen’s novels but now part of the collective memory of all these post-texts. I saw Hamil’s play and can confirm the script is intelligent, thoughtful, and reflects Austen too. Susan rightly said that Austen was deeply sceptical of the rescue fantasy; of the risks of emotional and erotic openness; aware of the pains of romance, and she summarized a couple of critics recently who took her point of view. During the discussion period afterward people emphasized how important Elinor and Marianne’s relationship to one another is; that the book is not primarily a romance and that is why people keep “correcting” it. There is great pain in Elinor when she discovers Edward’s lies, and shame in Marianne after she realizes she has been deluded. The films have embraced nostalgia; the narrative voice become cosy instead of almost unfriendly.

Kate Winslet as Marianne playing the deeply melancholy music of “The dreame” on the piano, a present from Brandon (borrowed from Austen’s Emma story and transformed).

I cite two post-texts that Susan did not mention: during Emma Brown’s era, E.H.Young wrote a moving rewrite of S&S as Jenny Wren: two sisters, Jenny and Dahlia Rendall with their mother, Louisa, lose their father/husband, are forced to move and try to make a living taking in lodgers; andCathleen Schine’s The Three Weismanns of Westport, which does the same thing as Joanna Trollope with rather more depth, originality, and yes dignity and grave pleasure in the style and stance. They do not fit into Susan’s trajectory as both did not add the typical elements of the above sequels, and both picked up on what Margaret Drabble in her introduction to an older Signet edition of S&S argued: that the economic and social milieu of the novel is its true interest.

The title alludes to Dickens’s disabled seamstress in Our Mutual Friend

Schine writes as a reviewer for the NYRB occasionally

For myself I have enjoyed many of the film adaptations. Recently I just loved Towhedi’s film adaptation of P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, and feel Jo Baker’s Longbourn is a good novel, not to omit Helen Fielding’s brilliant Bridget Jones books, and The Jane Austen Book Club (both the movie and books by and centered on women). I was interested by Anna Lefroy’s perceptive continuation of her aunt’s story (she did understand her aunt as few can, none of us having known her), and found Young’s book to be a quiet gem; Young is one of the authors covered in “The Virago Jane” by Katie Trumpener (in Deirdre Lynch’s Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees). Miss Mole is a truly effective novel in the tradition Jane Austen started within women’s novels.

Miss Mole would be in my terms a variation

Next up: Annette LeClair’s “In and Out of Foxholes,” what Izzy heard at her choice of sessions, Eighteenth Century Printing and some remarks on widows and widowers in Austen, more on Darcy, and, a conversation on Austenesque Variations, i.e., yet more on sequels from a panel conversation held in another room during the fall, and last thoughts on these American JASNA extravaganzas.

Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) and Maudie (Sally Hawkins) early on in film

Dear friends and readers,

A few days ago I saw a extraordinary movie which had a moment so uplifting that it caught my breath: Sherry (Kari Matchett) asks Maudie (Sally Hawkins) what has sustained her, enabled her to survive to paint these marvelously colorful expressionistic depictions of gardens, people, landscapes. Maud says with a deep sincerity, she has had windows to sit by and look at the world out of, and these experiences which she paints and from which painting and interaction within herelf give her such fulfilment, it’s enough. What more than this core does anyone have. Words to this effect.

An image of one of the real Maud Lewis’s paintings

She is living with Sherry because Sherry has taken her in after she left her partner-husband, Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) because his latest form of obtuse bullying includes trying to stop her from talking of the baby she gave birth to many years ago, and how it was taken from her immediately by her aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose) and brother Charles (Zachary Bennett), how they claimed the baby was born deformed and died, but was in fact (her aunt has now out of guilt and respect for Maud told her) perfectly formed, and lived. Her brother “sold” the baby, says Ida, because the couple was a stable, good pair of people and they thought this was for the best. They cannot have had Maud’s feelings in mind: we now realize she experienced an agon of grief, loss, and despair (she was led to believe she should never have children).

This is just one of an at first ever-growing pile tragic traumatic experience visited upon Maud (that we get to see): when we first meet her, she seems old, wizened, badly disabled by arthritis or some such condition, and despite this painting gay flowers. Flashback (the rest of the movie) to her in say her twenties when she is living a stifled life with this same aunt, no money, no access to any enjoyment, spoken harshly to, ripped out of her mother’s house (which her brother has now sold — he is into selling things) and left to rot with this aunt. Late at night, she quietly leaves the house and haunts a nearby roadhouse, where people are drinking, dancing, talking, and she can cage cigarettes, a glass of beer, and dream amid the noise and stars. She finds (most improbably it might seem) liberty, and then creates her life as a painter and loving companion with a silent seemingly “retarded” (he is autistic) fish-peddler (precarious living) she sees in a general store asking someone to write an advertisement for him for a “housemaid.” His house is a filthy shack. Ignoring the aunt’s protests, sneers, predictions she will be a “love slave” (which she laughs at astonished), she approaches this man and gets permission to become his housemaid.

Everett at work

More oppression is what she finds: giving her hardly any tools, no money, he demands she clean the house, cook for him (he is clearly impoverished from the state of his kitchen pots, utensils, stove), is barely civil. She has nowhere to sleep but next to him in his bed in an attic room. He speaks of an orphanage, and we gather his abominable behavior is what he learned there: he seeks control as a way of stablizing his environment. It gets so bad, he is so distrustful of her encroaching on him, taking power, that when an associate of his (also staking out a precarious living) speaks to her, and she responds, he hits her hard across the face. Her startled scream of anguish made the single slap and its sound means more than 100s killed in other movies. I thought to myself, if this keeps up, I can’t stay, and wondered if my friend (I was with a new friend) would mind if I insisted on leaving. But this is the nadir of the film.

Ride in the Snow (the movie landscape is filled with ice and snow)

Gradually she wins him over, by her patient improvements of this cottage and then her cheerful naive paintings celebratory of all around them, the natural world (we learn eventually we are in Nova Scotia, Canada), everything in the cottage, him, her, invented anecdotes. First the walls, then we see her making her painful way to a shop, grudgingly he buys her paper and paints because she has begun to use one can of paint to paint on discarded boards of wood she found outside the shack. The state of their relationship may be measured by his beginning to follow or go before her with his wagon, and then his putting her in the wagon while he pushes it ahead of him. It is Sherry’s first visit to complain that Everett has not delivered the fish she paid for that effects the first transformative change: Sherry sees the paintings on the wall, and asks Maud to paint postcards for her. She will pay Maud. Out of his first success, and Sherry’s advertising Maud to other people, telling her NYC friends, associates in gallery, Maud’s first enlarged custom comes. By this time Maud is regularly lying with Everett at night and when once he is moved to try to have sex with her, she has told the story she was told of the birth and death of a deformed baby. At that, he moves back, but he is not turned off. She has begun to write down an accounting of his business (money taken in, fish promised), and he has begun to do some and then gradually more and more of the household chores while she paints. He is alive to the money she is bringing in. The film is not sentimental. They form a partnership.

The marriage day — outside the church

But it is touching even if we feel that the roughness from him, and abject acceptance from her never goes. If I were to characterize their developing emotional relationship for the rest of the film I would use the word tender: a vein of tender affection is drawn out of him as he increasingly compensates himself for what she cannot do easily. They do make love in that bed, and (very characteristic throughout) she says gingerly and then repeats the idea they should marry, and eventually we see both of them dressing themselves respectable and carefully and then with the original friend-associate and his girlfriend coming out of a church a married couple. The mood of their life is cheerful, because very unexpectedly as soon as she is treated with minimal decency, a kind of laughter comes out of her eyes, her face shines with eagerness; she is quietly buoyant and I was reminded of the first time I saw Sally Hawkins in Mike Leigh’s Happy-go-Lucky (as long ago as 2008), which was about a stalwart happy community (that I now associate with Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls). Hawkins has the unusual ability convincingly to bring joy out of anguish (that is what she did as Anne Elliot in the 2007 Persuasion). Aisling Walsh, the director gives them plenty of room for inward-outward display; Sherry White’s script is both simple and subtle.

Maud Lewis in front of the small house where she lived with Everett

Not until the end of the film did I realize that Maud Lewis was a real Canadian artist (1903-70), that this was a deeply empathetic biopic of a beloved artist, who had indeed been arthritic, disabled, and rescued by while she rescued, an isolated man, also disabled. Just as the credits are about to roll, photographs of the real Maud and Everett Lewis appear (and we see these actors modeled their bodily appearance on the original people). As Glenn Kerry puts it, “This film fits into a particular kind of sub-genre: the story of two lonely people, societal outcasts, who find comfort and solace with each other.” But it does not treat this theme (or any other) conventionally. It’s not a story about how wonderful is fame — indeed I as a viewer kept worrying that somehow the increasing number of people showing up at the cottage, and eventually the crooked brother, would somehow break this couple up. The suspense of the film comes from our fear they will lose one another because they remain inarticulate: each concession comes unexpectedly, not prepared for. After Maud returns to Everett, and a scene between them where each has trouble acknowledging love (for different reasons):

she listens to him, pays attention

After they come back together, he seemingly suddenly drives her to a respectable looking house outside of which is a young 20 year old woman and her husband. Everett says “there is your daughter.” He has found the girl and Maud begins to cry. They also do not move from this isolated existence, so towards the end when her arthritis is much worse and she falls in the snow while Everett is off selling fish, she is in danger of freezing to death, of badly hurting herself.

What breaks them is aging, her disability gets worse. She cannot walk far, can hardly hold her brushes. She has throughout the movie smoked and now she can’t breathe. A doctor shows up, and declares she has emphysema and must stop smoking. Everett declares (in his usual bullying manner) she already has. But it is too late. One night together in their now electric-lit, heated, comfortable home, she falls over unable to breathe. He rushes her to a hospital, where she gradually dies. Hawkins performs her usual spectacular acting (she was an inimitable Duchess of Gloucester, jealous, foolishly playing with superstition, then blamed and tortured, gone mad in the Hollow Crown), but Ethan Hawke is not far behind. He looks different, thicker than his usual types, gradually utterly convincing. As he walked away from the hospital to loneliness in this cottage filled with her things, her absent present I remembered him when young in Sunrise, and then five years later Sunset with Julie Delpy, then ten years on, Midnight, and somehow this movie seemed another phase, with his beloved partner now deeply aged and quietly much wiser.

I write this detailed review because the blurbs on IMDB are so distorted (this is the story of an arthritic housekeeper who makes good in her community one runs — what community?) and the reviews few and uncomprehending or uncomfortable. It seems disabled people living in poverty need to be prettied up more. Manola Dargis sees the film as “about the fantasies we make of our lives as we spin beauty and hope from despair.” There is a book, Lance Woolaver’s Maud Lewis: The Heart on the Door where he shows a desperate life. Everett Lewis was a far more difficult man to live with than the film makes out. The movie softens, but it’s often through remembering and emphasizing the paintings, the imagery, the artist painting.

Cats

I often despair, I’m alone much of the time, and it was good for me to have validated the kinds of moments (mine literary) I have which make all the hard and tiring parts of life, the awareness of how excluded I am, still worth enduring for me. This has come to be another in my series of women artists. Maybe I will find the spirit to return to these yet.

About two years ago now (how time flies) I chaired two panels whose topic was supposed to be single women living alone befoe the 19th century. Single did not mean unmarried necessarily: rather a woman living as a single woman without a man as husband, father, brother, uncle, or some form of “guardian” cousin. I did not specify that the women had literally to be living alone but was looking rather for someone who had the highest authority in the house, was not with someone else as her peer. I was aware that out of six papers accepted for this panel “as near enough,” only one was about real women living alone — and in these two cases, the woman, Charlotte Lennox and Charlotte Smith, were married and separated from their husbands, with children and servants and other people as burdens in the household too. The others were about fictions, nunneries, a love affair in letters (two young people being forbidden to marry), and my own on widows and widowers in Austen, where only a few in the fictions could be described as living alone for any considerable period of time, with the exception of the impoverished (Mrs Smith, Miss Bates). The fact of non-marriage as shaping their living conditions was not brought up except explicitly for Miss Bates.

I was encouraged by editors scouting about to develop a prospectus for an anthology of essays on this topic, but I was immediately confronted with the reason for the lack of papers. I had no study to fall back on, only individual books part of which might swirl around this topic (single women — meaning spinsters — in a given period, or widows in 18th century France). Studies were done of fictions because there at least the topic was defined and individuals clearly described — there is a problem of definition itself as the unacceptability of the state led many women to keep their state invisible (Felicia Hemans springs to mind). On the one hand, I felt there were so many women of this type when I began to look, and on the other how a firm conception to bring them together had not been developed. You could get articles or chapters on the pressure on women to marry, but then what was discussed was marriage. No one wanted to look; this was not interesting unless the woman was seeking power and it was this search for gaining power that was the interest. I asked friends who had more status than I to join me as an editor (to ask other people to write essays is to need status oneself), but all were busy with other projects. I am a retired adjunct lecturer aka independent scholar. A second obstacle was finding people; this requires a circle of close friend-scholars with the same interests who see somke advantage to themselves in appearing in this anthology. One last: one friend said I might find it becomes “too lesbian” (in effect) and so be sure to cover a wide range of types! (contact people privately before resorting to the CFP).

But I had not quite given up the topic. It’s too close to my heart now. Last term (at the Oscher Institute of Lifelong Learning at American University) I taught a class I called 19th century women of letters and my proposal to do it again with a different set of books has been accepted at OLLI at Mason for the coming fall. It hadn’t taken long for me to realize that the typical women of letters was a woman supporting herself, often living alone if I used the expanded definition. It does seem as if living truly alone, literally (though still an anomaly), is a phenomenon only found in the 20th century: essentially it requires that a woman have a good paying job or income (I thought of Virginia Woolf’s desideratum of £500 per year, the equivalent today would be $35,000 per year); and that the norms or mores of the community do not allow male thugs to molest her on the supposition she must be a prostitute (in effect). Before the 19th century there was no large general literary marketplace, few circulating libraries, few magazines. All this was the basis for the 19th century woman of letters:

Now suddenly a thought has occurred to me which I had not been able to reach before: I could do a book on this topic if I chose 6 women I could write about myself. I had so worried myself over the obstacles to an anthology. But I can write a book on my own. I have the Library of Congress and Folger nearby, and access to two university libraries, one with the database. I can now see an introductory chapter; the body of the work; and a conclusion. I don’t know why I couldn’t break through to this before. Maybe need. I need absorbing work I can genuinely respect and look at as useful to others beyond giving myself some kind of meaning. I have now faced that I will be alone most of the time for the rest of my life. I can blog, teach, write and read to participate with others, but I want some overarching goal to guide me. An introductory chapter, a chapter on a specific woman and outline and I could try to send this to one of those editor-publishers whose names and presses I still have.

Another possible candidate: Julia Kavanagh (1824-77), disabled, she supported herself and her mother by her pen

So I’ve begun reading again Norma Clarke’s Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love, The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans and Jane Carlyle. I’m in the second half, the chapter on the relationship of Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Welsh Carlyle, and remembered a brilliant portrait of them by Virginia Woolf in her Second Common Reader.

Woolf’s essay is a delight. She manages to convey Geraldine and Jane’s lesbianism without openly showing it — so this is a kind of post-James text. I refer to how Eva Sedgwick says lesbian and gay texts around the time of Henry James were using various subterfuges but coming out much more to show gay and lesbian experience. Carter takes another step into transvestism and gender ambiguity which except for the high-jinks of Orlando I don’t see in Woolf.

I was drawn to the pathos of these women in Woolf. Clarke’s Ambitious Heights rather brings out how hard Jane Carlyle was on her women servants — she worked them like semi-slaves, and also made them be a personal comforter to her. Let me say that was wrong of Jane Carlyle; Clarke made me wonder if other women did this. I know that male masters did bugger their male servants, and the only control was fear of blackmail. Woolf doesn’t have the space to explain why Jewsbury lived far away, how she came to London to live close. There were two visits of living together, and the first a disaster, the second a reinforcement. Paradoxically for us a disappointment because the letters stop when they live around the corner from one another. Today they might start to text and tweet at one another. Then Jane’s need of Geraldine but after her sudden death (from fatigue? from stress? from repressive years and years of wearing down her organs), Geraldine spends 20 years alone. The one photo we have of Jewsbury shows her quietly reading, all dressed up. Unlike Woolf who is daring for her time, Clarke does not bring up or out the probable lesbianism of Carlyle and Jewsbury (Jane and Geraldine). It was published in 1990; Clarke doesn’t even discuss the possibility. 26 years ago maybe it was verboten to get an academic respectable if feminist book published.

Geraldine Jewsbury

I also started Kirsteen, which I am relieved to say is as excellent as Oliphant’s Hester, The Ladies Lindores and Lady Car: A sequel (about the later years of one of the heroines in the first book), or long ago now (I don’t remember it as well any more) Cousin Phoebe. I just love Oliphant’s books and she would be one of my subjects. I need to narrow each one of six to the trajectory of women living alone, why, how, with what results. I have been wanting to blog on her powerful if flawed The Marriage of Elinor and thinking about this novel in terms of this perspective, brings out what Oliphant is meaning to say by this book, and its continued effectiveness today.

My reading of The Marriage of Elinor went on late at night; I turned pages feverishly because like other of Oliphant’s novels I couldn’t predict what was going to happen, and only towards the middle became aware (as is so common with Oliphant) that it’s not centrally about the character of the young heroine, after whom it is name, Elinor, or she’s secondary; the center is shared by her mother, Mrs Dennistoun whose first name was finally uttered: Mary.

The book is about a woman who gives all to a daughter who continually makes very bad choices. And why are they bad? because she chooses what the world says is admirable. Elinor marries Philip Compton, a macho male handsome man who takes her into expensive society and she finds herself emotionally corroded, among hollow people, a target for monetary fleecing. The book’s true hero, John Tatham has not been passionate and aggressive enough in his proposal to her. He is a kind of Henry James male who does not commit himself emotionally until it’s too late. Sheltering Elinor destroys her life. No one is willing to tell her (including her mother) why she should not marry Phillip Compton who turns out to be (not to put a fine point on this) far more than promiscuous and a gambler: he’s a downright criminal whom her world protects from censor because of his rank and family. The way the story is set up it seems to be about the young heroine — which is what happens in Hester and why it gets off to a very slow start, with us realizing only gradually the young heroine, Elinor, is a doppelganger to the older her mother (Hester is this to her aunt-in-law, Catherine Vernon). It’s very much both and about how destructive is the norm which will not allow a girl to know anything about the world, try to support herself and not be a helpless hanger-on, but find some fulfillment of her own.

Merryn Williams who wrote the best of the three recent books in English on Oliphant says the point of The Marriage of Elinor is to show us how little sexual passion and the reasons for marriage out of love last a very short time; what women care for is motherhood. Men cannot understand these feelings. Elisabeth Jay reminds her reader this is a late novel and she concentrates on the woman in it I’ve not mentioned: dissolute, amoral, endlessly in society (a sort of Helene in Tolstoy’s War and Peace) who is represented as repellent. Jay does not respect this novel, mentions it because it is not romantic and shows the real psychology of a desperately bad marriage (in terms of either party getting any fulfillment).

As Elinor sees how bad her decision to marry Compton is, she does all she can to hide the truth. There are hints Compton hits her. Her happiest times it now seems to her were when she was left by this husband to live with her mother and her boy. Finally she separates heself him for the sake of her son, so the son shall not be brought up to become another amoral man. Her mother has given up a great deal of money to Philip as a kind of bribe. Meanwhile Elinor allows her fear of what the world might say adverse to her pride drive her decisions: say to move from the comfortable home her mother has lived in most of her life (it appears to be near Dorking, so Sussex) way up north. She will not send her precious son to a school where he is surrounded by peers because is determined to keep from him who his father was for real, and his background. In court Elinor gives a testimony literally true, but false in what it implies, and the ne’er-do-well husband is himself let go, and returns to having nothing to do with her once he gets his hands on enough money to live luxuriously. But by the end of the novel she has silently conceded the man she married is a criminal type even if he has a title, and she goes to live alone up north, leaving her son with Tatham whose advice she has finally relied upon. The crucial last turn of the book is the question of whether her son will turn against her when he realizes all his life he has been kept away from others, gone to a school where he was not with his own class or boys of his own intellectual level; he does not partly because John Tatham has stayed by his side and provides the explanation and continuity the boy needs. The two women end up living alone in peace at the book’s end

Oliphant reminds me a little of Charlotte Smith: not finding a new radically changed structure on which to plot her story. She often wants us to see her characters confronting hegemonic norms of other people and unable to break them down — in many areas of life and death too. We are supposed to heavily criticize Elinor. I am so used to the conventional stance of pro-heroine, but in these latest scenes what Elinor wants to do (flee the law) is so egregious. Each time flight: each time refuse to cope with what she has created and wrecking havoc on those she says her actions are protecting. The book critiques the passive romantic supposedly super-virtuous heroine; she must come out and she must engage with the situations she’s created. The power of the book comes from what seems a skewed POV divided between Tatham and Mrs Denistoun who anguish over Elinor

How did Kavanagh, Jewsbury, Oliphant manage it? Woolf? I end on Eileen Atkins as Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Eileen Atkins as Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

So, added to Austen and sheerly the 18th century, woman artists, and foremother poets, I hope blogging here by thinking through work I do towards a book by me to be called The Anomaly. I’m an anomaly by the way. Not because I fit the definition of nearly living alone (which I do): a widow, with my unmarried daughter, a librarian and two cats, but because I’m a very learned scholar with no rank and no income except my widow’s annuity and social security, and the money my mother and Jim left me; because I teach at a place where I don’t quite fit either as a student (yesterday I became aware of how many of the women at AU went to elite or Ivy League colleges and studied to be lawyers and other professionals — they can have no idea who I am, from a free university, getting there by bus, studying English Literature) or teacher (I overdo), and because my social life such as it is is here on Net. Is this enough to be getting on with? I’ve got many rooms of my own and for now more than the minimum income …

Emma got up on the morrow more disposed for comfort than she had gone to bed, more ready to see alleviations of the evil before her, and to depend on getting tolerably out of it — Emma, Chapter 16, after the ordeal of Christmas …

Amy Brenneman as Sylvia (a sort of amalgam of traits from Austen heroines, with her plot-line that of Persuasion) reading Emma, the first choice to read of The Jane Austen Book Club

Dear friends and readers,

A mere seven days have slipped by (I say this ironically) since I wrote my first report on the Burney conference in DC, which occurred on Wednesday, 20 October, just before the official JASNA meeting began this year on Thursday, 21 October. I covered two-thirds of the papers on Burney. Here I offer summaries of the talks on Burney at the end of the day, and a general description of what a JASNA conference is like, and brief account of the key-note address (as I described it elsewhere). As an overview of all the papers on Burney I suggest that we saw a conflicted woman: she lived in a world ordered by imperialism abroad and patronage at home; she tried to find space for herself as a writer and (reminding me of what D.W. Harding said of Austen’s fiction so long ago) ways to express her identity and ideas that would not antagonize those dearest to her (her father) and who she did and had to respect. I have noticed over several conferences too (I may be wrong) that the novels and sheer texts too favored for discussion are Cecilia and The Wanderer. As I began to write out the notes on the Emma conference, I did remember the novel and a few of the good film adaptations whose pictorialism (mostly in the novel) help realize aspects of the novel, and felt a little better: Austen does that for me. I hope to concentrate on Austen’s mature fiction in a paper on Ekphrasis in Austen for the coming Austen and Art conference this coming Monday. A good way to start another year.

****************************

Frances Burney and Politics (In continuation):

Again a painting by Ramsay, this time of Charlotte and her two older boys — these paintings are said to show the queen had mulatto features, which was brought up (separately) during the conference

The third paper of the afternoon panel, “Celebrity and Material Culture” was given by Kate H. Hamilton, “Queen Charlotte, Burney, and Virtuous Servitude.” Kate talked about the conflicts between the role of a public servant and the role of a novelist. Fanny saw herself as an apolitical writer, but in order to be careful did not send her journal-letters to her sister, Susan, through the post. Her virtuous reputation was dependent on her social connections. While there she was part of a feminized society, attending to queen’s personal needs in dress, entrusted with the queen’s jewelry, and this identity was the one she had to live out publicly. At the same time her fame as the writer of Evelina had helped bring her to the queen’s attention, and she spent much time writing creatively. Kate provided a text which suggests how Frances writes about these conflicts (somewhat coyly) in her diaries:

The Queen sent for me after Breakfast, and delivered to me a long Box, called here The Jewel Box, in which her Jewels are carried to & from Town, that are worn on the Drawing Room Days. The great bulk of them remain in Town all the Winter, & remove to Windsor for all the Summer, with the rest of the family. She told me, as she delivered the key into my Hands, that as there was always much more room in the Box than her travelling Jewels occupied, I might make what use I pleased of the remaining part, adding, with a very expressive smile, ‘I dare say you have Books, & Letters that you may be glad to carry backwards and forwards with you. –‘ I owned that nothing was more true, & thankfully accepted the offer. It has proved to me, since, a comfort of the first magnitude, in conveying all my choice Papers & Letters safely in the carriage with me, as well as Books in present reading, & numerous odd things … CJL 1:192)

Kate mentioned that Mme de Genlis wrote more openly about conflicts between her public, writing, and private roles in life that tarnished her reputation.

Kelly Fleming’s “Miss Larolles, Lady Belgrade’s Shoe Buckles and the Law” was another paper which used elements, characTers, and scenes from Cecilia to discuss larger political and social issues, in this case the contradictions between the way the law of debt worked and what a woman might assume was her private property. Kelly discussed how the auction in Cecilia showed how a wife was forced to pay her husband’s debts by selling her paraphernalia (e.g., shoe buckles). Such property could also be sold when the husband died to pay for debts. Without having real ownership, the woman could nonetheless be indirectly made to pay a debt (unless say another male in the family stepped in). Such events also brought the pain of exposure as they were also fashionable to go to. Kelly brought in the way disguises were used at masquerades (one of her guardians Mr Briggs warns her against the glittering objects on display as belonging to people); and again the point was women cannot find or rely on power through seeming to own anything. During Cecilia the heroine is fleeced of her inheritance of £10,000.

After an afternoon tea break, Lorna Clarke’s description of her and Sara Rose Smith’s edition of Sophia Elizabeth Burney’s “Works” and “Novels, Plays, and Poems” combined with the fourth panel, “Family Politics” ended the academic day.

Lorna said a generous grant from the Burney Society published this volume under the aegis of the Juvenilia Press started by Juliet McMaster. The book was privately printed, and some 15 years ago surfaced in an edition called Works; in 2009 Peter Sabor bought a copy from a private collector. There are two copies of a first volume and one of a second. This new edition combines these; the texts project a strong exuberance; Sophia was perhaps 13 when she wrote them and copied them out in fair copies later. Some 14 titles, 2 novelettes, 2 poems. Titles include Murder Prevented (a playlet); Murder Committed (a tragedy where there is is female confinement, women suffer violence from men; lovers kill themselves); Unlawful Marriage (family struggles, with nightmarish images); A History of Jack Scarrow (boy runs away 100 miles to London). One comedy is reminiscent of Congreve. The stories remember real traumas in the Burney family; events that occurred. They register that Charles Burney’s affability could be seen as sycophancy. As far as we know Fielding’s Amelia was the only novel in Charles Burney’s library.

In her paper, “Burney at Cheapside,” Lorna argued that Burney’s writings are deeply imbued with the politics of gender and class; her place in London society was equivocal, and her consciousness of this played a large part in her unhappiness at court. The Burneys hid that Esther Sleep, Charles’s first wife, owned a shop that sold fans; Charles’s origins were in the servant class, and he used his second wife’s money for income. In her depictions of women, in the life-writing Esther’s mother (Frances’s grandmother) is depicted as an angel, while in Evelina we find a French grandmother, Madame Duval whose vulgar, aggressive behavior mortifies the heroine. Evelina exorcises the ghosts of the Burney forebears: the portrait of Madame Duval, a cathartic release for Frances; the Branghams, versions of the Sleep family. In The Witlings we are in a millinery shop; both Cecilia and Camilla show similar subtexts. Lorna then discussed the use of fans in Burney’s journals to show how through comedy and realism Frances expressed complex feelings she could not approach any other way: pictures on them, lines of verse; how they are used as props, in court ceremonies, as instruments, material symbols.

From a recent production of The Witlings

Victoria Warren discussed Frances’s play, The Witlings as a treasure trove of every painful sorrow, from what is in the play to how Frances was forced to cancel any productions ever in her lifetime. Some of the facets of the play’s humor show strong feminism; expose deep anti-intellectualism of popular culture (one character has such an aversion to reading, the sight of a book is distasteful), heartlessness; most satirical lines are given to Censor. Victoria went through the individual characters to show how how each functions. There is sentiment too, an almost thwarted love story: the heroine, Cecilia Stanley, grieves because Beaufort does not seek her out for herself.

Colonel Molesworth Phillips

Jocelyn Harris’s paper on Colonel Molesworth Phillips, Frances’s sister, Susan’s abusive husband, closed the conference. Jocelyn argued that Austen attacked Phillips in her characterization of Fanny Price’s father (often drunk, clearly capable of violence, a do-nothing useless man) in Mansfield Park. Austen of course read Burney’s novels; knew the Cookes who were related to the Burneys; her brother Francis, from his time in the navy, would have know of Burney’s brother’s career (Jocelyn went into many details here). I’ll add that Austen mentions Burney’s son at one point in one of her later letters; and she would probably have known whatever gossip was commonly known about the Burneys. Jocelyn seemed to think that Frances Burney would have recognized this portrait of her brother-in-law in Mansfield Park. My comment is there are no textual proofs whatsoever for this assertion; nor that (as Jocelyn also suggested) Burney would have read Mansfield Park in this way (so seen this “message”), if she read it (there is no record of her reading any of Austen’s novels in all her voluminous writing); and many men in the era were in the military, were violent outside their official job, alcoholics, and ended drones, living on small pensions, all at once.

Norbury Park, owned by Frances’s friends, the Lockes, where she built Camilla Cottage, which she had to give up later in life (romantic picturesque drawing in Constance Hill’s Jane Austen: Her Home and Her Friends

In the last half-hour of the conference there was a wide-ranging general discussion which many of the people there joined in on. Some of the most interesting remarks I got down were about other artistic and learned people who Burney wrote about in her journals; about some sources for Burney’s plays, her fictionalizing in the journals, her borrowing from other authors, and Joyce Hemlow’s long career and how she knew much about the property owned by the Burneys and the way they made money to survive. Harder questions were about Frances’s own anxieties as these emerge in her real life finances. We all went out to waiting cabs and headed for a dinner together at McCormick & Schnick’s (said to be a fashionable restaurant in DC). It was expensive. The society will next meet with the Aphra Behn Society next November 2017 in the Pittsburgh Renaissance Hotel.

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Doran Goodwin as Emma reassuring her father that her marriage to Mr Knightley does not mean she and her father will part (1972 BBC Emma, scripted Denis Constanduros)

It is almost impossible for any individual to give any general or clear idea of the special lectures, individual break-out sessions, and key-note talks of the JASNA conference. Although the conference was said to begin on Friday (which the conference fee to pay for the sessions covered), there were “light” special lectures (by people who’ve gotten awards for popularizing books, TV personalities, an author of an Austen sequel), group conversations (including a food specialist, people dressing up in costumes, a dramatic sketch with a local fine actress who has performed in plays made out of Austen’s novels) and talks at scattered times on Wednesday and Thursday (fitted into four sessions, for each of which you had to purchase a ticket beyond the conference and hotel fees). I omit the other “special” workshops (on handiwork, fancy work, making things, dancing lessons). At the same time there were tours from the hotel to various tourist places around DC (including to the Folger Shakespeare Library). The conference fee covered but four sessions, and during each nine panels or papers and discussions were going on at once.

There also had been on on-line and one in-person writing workshop for “young writers” (students) done by three name Austen scholars and some volunteers from American university on themes from Emma. There was also a book store, a costume shop.

I regretted having to miss most of the official conference (8 sessions a time). At an earlier conference in Portland, Maine there were far more session times, though again there were a large number on at the same time (not quite 9 each time). I noticed a costume curator’s talk late on Thursday but as there was no further information about this one I didn’t try to come just at that time on day for that. (Were you staying in the glamorous hotel it would have been easy to do.) As part of the conference itself (no extra fee or ticket) there was a concert on Friday night (with nothing on against it), a selection of regency era music performed by a “specialist historical flute player” using an early 19th century Broadwood square fortepiano. My daughter would have liked to go to some of the dance workshops also going on at conflicting times, and requiring a ticket and early registration.

By simply citing all this plainly I hope to have given a sense of what most of this JASNA conference was like. For me there was far too much taking us away from the text of Austen’s Emma.

So the “official” conference (what your fee paid for) got together as a group on Friday at 1 for Bharat Tandan’s talk ending around 2:15 in the general ballroom. Most of the people at the conference were in the room at the same time so it was a fairly large crowd sitting there politely. I’ve described it fully here (scroll down). Briefly, Prof Tandan asserted rather incoherently there is much invisible in Emma of the greatest interest, but he did not go on to discuss in what these invisible elements consisted. There were then two sessions, one from 2:45 to 3:45 pm, and the second from 4:00 to 5:00 pm.

I’ll save what content on Austen’s Emma I and my daughter were able to hear for a third blog and here just cite the sessions I was especially sorry to have to miss: Anita Solway’s “The Darkness of Emma:” how there is “a somber vision of the vulnerability of our lives that anticipates Persuasion,” and if there are “blessings of existence” that “counteract its devastations;” Gillian Webster’s “Solving the Puzzle of Jane Fairfax: Jane Austen and the Anti-Heroine:” why is Jane Fairfax “so central to the novel, and why is she not the heroine,” how Austen “subverts conventions and challenges her readers to accept a different perspective” (than the usual?); Sheryl Craig “Dependence or Independence;” on the 16 characters gainfully employed in Emma; Holly Field, “Accountable to Nobody: Motherless children in Emma;” Susan Jones’s “Oysters and Alderneys: Emma and the Animal Economy: on the animals (there and alive, and I suppose, alas, killed and eaten). Finally Jeffrey Nigo of the Art Institute of Chicago, together with Andrea Cawetti of Harvard (experts in music, opera, she a former opera singer), on “Divas in the Drawing Room, or Italian Opera Comes to Highbury:” it was possibly a serious talk about arias performed in the era, and the career trajectory of a woman singer.

Romola Garai as Emma after the assembly ball, come home and practicing as strenuously as she can for a little while (2009 BBC Emma, scripted Sandy Welch)

William Hodges (1744-97), An Indian Village with a Man seated in the Foreground

Dear friends and readers,

My report on the panels and papers given by the Burney society on 20 October 2016, the day before the “official” beginning of the JASNA (Jane Austen Society of America) meeting and on the panels and papers of the JASNA AGM has been much delayed, and I regret to say will be less specific and shorter than my previous conference reports. I got lost on the way to Trinity College where the Burney Society was holding its meeting, and missed much of the keynote address, and in any case (as I’ve said) my ability with stenography permit me only to record the gist of most of the papers; the JASNA group had but four (!) break-out sessions (astonishing) and two serious speeches on the Friday and Saturday (the 21st and 22nd) I was able to attend. There was one lecture mid-morning Sunday on an edition of Emma (1816, Philadelphia, by Juliette Wells) as part of a breakfast set-up and nothing else; since I wasn’t staying at the expensive hotel, and was teaching on Monday I could not take out the time for one book history talk. I’ve described the places and ambiance the two different societies met in when I came home lest I forget the experiences (scroll down; or read the material transferred to this blog in the comments section).

Here I cover two-thirds of papers on Burney. These papers placed Burney in contexts she claimed she didn’t wouldn’t talk about, but was in fact subject to all her life and is central to her books and life’s experience: the colonialist, patronage “system” and familial politics of her era.

I came in at the end of Tara Ghosal Wallace’s detailed talk on “Burney and the Politics of Empire,” which focused first on the hypocritical, corrupt, ferocious political in-fighting among factions in India, which through her male relatives, and attachment to George III’s court influenced Burney’s daily existence. Prof Wallace gave a history in detail of local English politics and office holders attached to and in India; she thought Warren Hastings caught between cross-fires (whom Burney obtusely absolved from any guilt or responsibility without ever giving any cogent details); she described the nuances of party politics (Indian and British individual and office alliances) amid the sexual courtship and humiliating scenes of Burney’s time at court; and the politics of empire in The Wanderer. Burney was under “intolerable psychological pressure from contradictory points of view, all of these personal to her.”

The first panel was called “The Stormy Sea of Politics,” and all three papers were on French and national politics. Geoffrey Sill discussed how Frances differed from her father’s arch-conservative reaction to the French revolution: Charles was for continuing absolute monarchy, saw the idea of the rights of men as absurd. Burney, as we know, lavished praise on her father, but we can see where she differed: she thought a king was as limited by law as any man; she was horrified by the misery she saw in France. She was not sceptical about the needs of people demonstrating. Anne-Claire Michoux discussed how the female body was represented in Burney’s diary-journals and The Wanderer. Burney’s work is deeply invested in social issues; she published a pamphlet on emigres, and admired Mme de Stael. In Evelina women are victims of physical violence, of psychological assault; in her fiction, her heroines are oppressed through their bodies, they have vulnerable incomes too. Brian McCrea seems to have received harsh reviews of his book on Burney where he presented her as a conservative: he argued that Burney was terrified of the French revolution. Burney writes wryly but also as apolitically as she can, and defends the patriarchal feudal world. Doody saw affinities with Wollstonecraft and Jacobin novels, and argued the character of Elinor in The Wanderer stands for the revolution as a noble flame. McCrea argued this is to misread; Burney’s Admiral Powell’s views are those validated.

Hubert Robert (1733-1808), A servant brings papers to an aristocrat intent on renovating his garden with classical structures

After a coffee break, the second panel of the day was “Ruling Politics.” Lori Halvorsen Zerne discussed authoritarianism in The Wanderer. Juliette stands for “the other,” and is treated with hatred by some; many in the book are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of her identity. Good characters in the novel are cowardly while the bad are audacious. Hannah Messina’s paper title was “Politics at Home: Uncomfortable Domesticity in Cecilia.” Class, gender, charity and debt are among the novel’s topics; the conflict over last names confirms patriarchal tyranny. We learn that outside the home Cecilia is in danger; she needs a place to be secure. Her guardians interfere, her friends wreak personal catastrophe (the auction) on themselves. Cecilia had hoped for a quiet time with her friend, Mrs Harrell, but instead finds herself fleeced. One problem is it’s impossible for Cecilia to avoid or opt out of this society yet she herself can be thrown out and made a homeless beggar. After Delville’s uncertain and jealous treatment of her, she collapses. The novel shows the nature of a character’s domestic space is crucial to the development of an identity. Sara Tavela concentrated on Burney’s presentation of the medical and psychological sufferings of George III in her journals. Burney shows us there is no effective control over the king’s illness, and that the Queen is left without helpful information.

It was not quite lunch-time and so time for discussion of all we had heard up to then. Someone suggested that Burney created a template in her novels by which we can see how women are left without resources, are not listened to. Society dictates to them who they are. Women in authority are not granted full respect, find themselves in a liminal space.

There was a talk during lunch. Laura Rosenthal asked “what do we do with Sir Jaspar.” Laura saw the home as having theatrical spaces; commodities are props by which we construct our artificial selves. Burney resists desiring interiors and exteriors. Marilyn Francus suggested that in Cecilia we see how people talk to one another with the norms of social desires break down. Sociability crumbles in Cecilia; at the close the heroine crumbles too. Alex suggested that male characters also experience discomfort in their homes (e.g. Belfield).

and John Bogle’s miniature (1785) of her with a pinched face; it seems the truest to her features

An enlargement so you can see her facial features

Portraits, Laura said, represent the remains of a life’s performance; we can see the exaggerations of her dress and hats; all three provide much insight. In the first and third she gazes at us, interacting with us. Croker, a hostile reviewer, described the way Burney looked late in life cruelly: she was an old coquette. Butterworth found another image said to be of Burney at 15, up-close, intimate somehow. Laura compared these images to verbal descriptions of the heroines in the novels; and then to other portraits by painters of famous actresses (Siddons, Robinson), duchesses (Georgiana Spenser). These gorgeous hats as props keep re-appearing. Laura felt Burney probably preferred the miniature.

Kirsten Hall’s paper title was “Burney and Ciceronian Celebrity.” She talked about how celebrated Ciceronian ideals and how classical figures were depicted affected Burney’s fiction and attitudes. Cicero’s Moral Offices (obligations, duties) showed a world of reciprocal relationships, favors, and services. It was thought reading this book was good for people. we can see how widely deivergent rules for social behavior can be from what an individual may want or feel to be right. Kirsten then showed how the characters of Mortimer and Cecilia fit in; what she owes him, how they behave to one another (in an imagined bookshop). She also went over real behavior in a real library, and what we see suggested is Burney lived (like most of us) by compromise.

Since the last two papers took a somewhat different direction, I’ll stop here as this blog is long enough.